Confusion

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  354. Those who have experienced difficulties have formed this opinion because of things observed in the sensible world, i.e., the opinion that contradictories and contraries can both be true at the same time, inasmuch as they see that contraries are generated from the same thing. Therefore, if it is impossible for nonbeing to come into being, the thing must have existed before as both contraries equally. This is Anaxagoras ’ view, for he says that everything is mixed in everything else. And Democritus is of the same opinion, for he holds that the void and the full are equally present in any part, and yet one of these is non-being and the other being. 355. Concerning those who base their opinions on these grounds, then, we say that in one sense they speak the truth, and that in another they do not know what they are saying. For being has two meanings, so that in one sense a thing can come to be from non-being and in another sense it cannot. Hence the same thing can both be and not be at the same time, but not in the same respect; for while the same thing can be potentially two contraries at the same time, it cannot in complete actuality. 356. Further, we shall expect them to believe that among beings there is also another kind of substance to which neither motion nor generation nor corruption belongs in any way. COMMENTARY663. Having raised arguments against those who deny the first principle, and having settled the issue, here the Philosopher indicates how one must proceed differently against various men who adopted different versions of the above-mentioned error. This is divided into two parts. In the first (353:C 663) he shows that one must proceed differently against different men. In the second (354:C 665) he begins to proceed in a different way than he did above ( “ Those who ” ). He accordingly says, first (353), that the same method “ of discussion, ” i.e., of popular address (or “ of good grammatical construction, ” according to another translation, or of well ordered argument “ or intercession, ” as is said in the Greek, i.e., of persuasion) is not applicable to all of the foregoing positions; that is, to the position that contradictories can be true, and to the position that truth consists in appearances. For some thinkers adopt the foregoing positions for two reasons. Some do so because of some difficulty; for since certain sophistical arguments occur to them, from which the foregoing positions seem to follow, and they do not know how to solve them, they accept the conclusion. Hence their ignorance is easily cured. For one must not oppose them or attack the arguments which they give, but must appeal to their thought, clearing up the mental difficulties which have led them to form such opinions; and then they will give up these positions.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Adults need to understand that a child’s explanations for divorce are deeply rooted in the child’s psyche and cannot be overridden by complex adult explanations. In fact, adult explanations often push the child’s real feelings and thoughts underground. Children know exactly what adults expect of them. They’re eager to comfort their troubled parents and are well schooled in supplying answers that grown-ups want to hear. I stress this aspect of a child’s response because current popular educational programs for children whose parents are in the process of divorcing assume that children willingly believe what they are told. Well-meaning adults think that children will modify their thinking because a kindly teacher, counselor, or parent explains that they are wrong. I know of several court-sponsored educational programs where the children march around chanting, “I didn’t do it.” But the explanation that “no one is at fault” is far too abstract and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the young child. The truth is that many children believe for years that they caused their parents’ divorce regardless of what they are told. When the parents quarrel, the children’s view that they are the root of the difficulty is confirmed. They conclude: if I were to disappear, the rift between my parents would mend. No explanation to the contrary can undo this observation. Of course, children need to make rational sense of this central event in their lives. But any explanation of divorce needs to be told and retold in accord with the child’s unfolding capacity to understand as she grows up. There is no quick way to accomplish this. Like children in other violent families, Larry and his sister witnessed their father’s assaults on their mother. No attempt was made to hide the violence or to protect them from seeing or hearing everything that transpired. If the children tried to intervene and protect their mother, they were in danger of being hurt—and so they stopped trying. Yet I am always surprised at how little these same children understood about their mother’s plight and how, like Larry, they tried to rewrite family history. Many of them spent years trying to restore the abusive, violent, dysfunctional family. It makes you wonder whether their eyes were ever open. One boy who was physically beaten by his father said, “All I can think of was how much she hurt my dad by leaving him. She probably feels like a conqueror.” How did he get it so wrong? Another child said, “My mom is such a bad person. She is so cold-blooded. My dad was so upset.” And another told me, “Divorce upset my dad real bad. He lost much more than my mom did. It was unfair.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “All day long people have been asking me, ‘What can I do to help you?’ When I woke up this morning, they kept coming to me, ‘Can we get you some breakfast?’ At midday they came to me, ‘Can we get you some lunch?’ All day long, ‘What can we do to help you?’ This evening, ‘What do you want for your meal, how can we help you?’ ‘Do you need stamps for your letters?’ ‘Do you want water?’ ‘Do you want coffee?’ ‘Can we get you the phone?’ ‘How can we help you?’ ” Herbert sighed and looked away. “It’s been so strange, Bryan. More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.” He looked at me, and his face twisted in confusion. I gave Herbert one last long hug, but I was thinking about what he’d said. I thought of all the evidence that the court had never reviewed about his childhood. I was thinking about all of the trauma and difficulty that had followed him home from Vietnam. I couldn’t help but ask myself, Where were these people when he really needed them? Where were all of these helpful people when Herbert was three and his mother died? Where were they when he was seven and trying to recover from physical abuse? Where were they when he was a young teen struggling with drugs and alcohol? Where were they when he returned from Vietnam traumatized and disabled? I saw the cassette tape recorder that had been set up in the hallway and watched an officer bring over a tape. The sad strains of “The Old Rugged Cross” began to play as they pulled Herbert away from me. — There was a shamefulness about the experience of Herbert’s execution I couldn’t shake. Everyone I saw at the prison seemed surrounded by a cloud of regret and remorse. The prison officials had pumped themselves up to carry out the execution with determination and resolve, but even they revealed extreme discomfort and some measure of shame. Maybe I was imagining it but it seemed that everyone recognized what was taking place was wrong. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Adults need to understand that a child’s explanations for divorce are deeply rooted in the child’s psyche and cannot be overridden by complex adult explanations. In fact, adult explanations often push the child’s real feelings and thoughts underground. Children know exactly what adults expect of them. They’re eager to comfort their troubled parents and are well schooled in supplying answers that grown- ups want to hear. I stress this aspect of a child’s response because current popular educational programs for children whose parents are in the process of divorcing assume that children willingly believe what they are told. Well-meaning adults think that children will modify their thinking because a kindly teacher, counselor, or parent explains that they are wrong. I know of several court-sponsored educational programs where the children march around chanting, “I didn’t do it.” But the explanation that “no one is at fault” is far too abstract and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the young child. The truth is that many children believe for years that they caused their parents’ divorce regardless of what they are told. When the parents quarrel, the children’s view that they are the root of the difficulty is confirmed. They conclude: if I were to disappear, the rift between my parents would mend. No explanation to the contrary can undo this observation. Of course, children need to make rational sense of this central event in their lives. But any explanation of divorce needs to be told and retold in accord with the child’s unfolding capacity to understand as she grows up. There is no quick way to accomplish this. Like children in other violent families, Larry and his sister witnessed their father’s assaults on their mother. No attempt was made to hide the violence or to protect them from seeing or hearing everything that transpired. If the children tried to intervene and protect their mother, they were in danger of being hurt—and so they stopped trying. Yet I am always surprised at how little these same children understood about their mother’s plight and how, like Larry, they tried to rewrite family history. Many of them spent years trying to restore the abusive, violent, dysfunctional family. It makes you wonder whether their eyes were ever open. One boy who was physically beaten by his father said, “All I can think of was how much she hurt my dad by leaving him. She probably feels like a conqueror.” How did he get it so wrong? Another child said, “My mom is such a bad person. She is so cold-blooded. My dad was so upset.” And another told me, “Divorce upset my dad real bad. He lost much more than my mom did. It was unfair.” The Need for Intervention in Violent Families AT THE TIME of divorce much can be done to help children who have witnessed violence. But before we get to suggestions, let’s first consider what happened to the families in our study in the years following the breakup.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Augustine, however, disapproves of this explanation (Gen. ad lit. xii, 3 seqq.) for this reason that the Apostle states that he knew he was rapt even to the third heaven. Wherefore he knew it to be really the third heaven to which he was rapt, and not an imaginary likeness of the third heaven: otherwise if he gave the name of third heaven to an imaginary third heaven, in the same way he might state that he was rapt in the body, meaning, by body, an image of his body, such as appears in one’s dreams. Now if he knew it to be really the third heaven, it follows that either he knew it to be something spiritual and incorporeal, and then his body could not be rapt thither; or he knew it to be something corporeal, and then his soul could not be rapt thither without his body, unless it were separated from his body. Consequently we must explain the matter otherwise, by saying that the Apostle knew himself to be rapt both in soul and body, but that he ignored how his soul stood in relation to his body, to wit, whether it were accompanied by his body or not. Here we find a diversity of opinions. For some say that the Apostle knew his soul to be united to his body as its form, but ignored whether it were abstracted from its senses, or again whether it were abstracted from the operations of the vegetative soul. But he could not but know that it was abstracted from the senses, seeing that he knew himself to be rapt; and as to his being abstracted from the operation of the vegetative soul, this was not of such importance as to require him to be so careful in mentioning it. It follows, then, that the Apostle ignored whether his soul were united to his body as its form, or separated from it by death. Some, however, granting this say that the Apostle did not consider the matter while he was in rapture, because he was wholly intent upon God, but that afterwards he questioned the point, when taking cognizance of what he had seen. But this also is contrary to the Apostle’s words, for he there distinguishes between the past and what happened subsequently, since he states that at the present time he knows that he was rapt “fourteen years ago,” and that at the present time he knows not “whether he was in the body or out of the body.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  In telling these stories, I realized that adults raised in divorced families carry within them a unique kind of history. They are the product of two distinct families and the transition between them. Their lives begin within an intact family that one day vanishes. This is replaced by a series of upheavals that leave them confused and frightened. The next chapters of their lives occur within the postdivorce family, which can take many forms. The family can expand to include a new cast of characters—other adults or children who are temporarily or permanently a part of their lives—or it can contract into a diminished version of the predivorce household. And it can be everything in between. These disparate parts of their histories continue to occupy their minds as they mature. At each new developmental stage, they assess anew what they have lost or gained from the divorce. Often the balance sheet changes as circumstances and relationships change. At each stage they reach new conclusions about themselves, their parents, and their stepparents, and they arrive at a perspective that they then carry into their adult relationships. The life stories of those raised in intact families reveal that children of divorce live in a separate but parallel universe. We found similarities and differences between the two groups all along the life course. I did not expect to find these contrasts so clearly defined between youngsters brought up on the same block and attending the same schools. All the people in this study have been given new names and other disguises to protect their privacy. Sometimes we used composites based on the stories of several young people to strengthen the disguise. But apart from these changes, their words and the major events of their lives are unedited. I’ve discovered over many years of interviewing children and adults that people rise to lyrical heights when they feel that someone is finally listening. One final note. I am not against divorce. How could I be? I’ve probably seen more examples of wretched, demeaning, and abusive marriage than most of my colleagues. I’m keenly aware of the suffering of many adults and their long-lasting efforts to improve their lives after divorce. I’m also aware that for many parents the decision to divorce is the most difficult decision in their lives; they cry many a night before taking such a drastic step. And I am, of course, aware of the many voices on the radio, on television, and in certain political and religious circles that say divorce is sinful. That it is always detrimental to children and that people who divorce are selfish, only concerned with their own needs. But I don’t know of any research, mine included, that says divorce is universally detrimental to children. People who espouse this view speak earnestly from their own lofty values, but I suspect they have not spent time with families facing intractable problems that can lead to divorce.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  How is the inner template of the child of divorce different from that of the young adult in the intact family—especially if the child of divorce, in accord with the current advice of mediators and court personnel, has access to both parents and the parents refrain from fighting during the postdivorce years? As every child of divorce told me, no matter how often they see their parents, the image of them together as a loving couple is forever lost. A father in one home and a mother in another home does not represent a marriage, however well they communicate. Separate may be equal but it is not together. As children grow up and choose partners of their own, they lack this central image of the intact marriage. In its place they confront a void that threatens to swallow them whole. Unlike children from intact families, children of divorce in our study spoke very little about their parents’ interaction. They hardly ever referred to their parents’ behavior at the breakup. By and large their central complaint is that no one had explained the divorce to them and that the reasons were shrouded in mystery. When reasons were offered, they sounded to them like platitudes designed to avoid telling what really happened. Their parents said, we were different people, we had nothing in common. Children of divorce hardly mentioned their parents together except to express their disdain when the parents continued to fight or behave badly with each other at the birthdays of grandchildren and the like. Indeed, the parents’ interaction was a black hole—as if the couple had vanished from memory and the children’s conscious inner life. This need for a good internal image of the parents as a couple is important to the child’s development throughout her growing up years, but at adolescence, the significance of this internal template of man—woman relationships rises. Memories and images from past and present come together and crescendo in a mighty chorus of voices at entry into young adulthood when the young person confronts for real the issues of choice in love and commitment. In the old Yiddish folk song, the marriage broker asks the maiden, “Whom will you marry?” and her first words echo the contemporary theme of Karen and her millions of sisters and brothers. She replies, “Who will be true to me? Will he take care of me? Will he leave at the crack of dawn when we have our first fight? Will he love me?”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “I have a mama . . . you mean I have another mama?” “You have two mamas. And a little brother, too!” Mama says. “His name is Norman,” Cherie says. I sort of remember calling someone else Mommy because she wanted me to call her that. I visited her house last Christmas. Mama dressed me like a princess in a crimson velvet dress, patent-leather shoes, and clean white stockings. Susan called the other mommy my Christmas Mama, because she wanted to give us Christmas presents. But I don’t know why I have to see her now—you don’t get gifts for the Fourth of July. “Is it Christmas Mama?” They all start laughing until it seems like Mama might start to cry. “Yes, honey,” she says. “It’s your Christmas Mama.” I smile around at all of them. “I get Christmas presents?” Susan and Mama pack for my visit with Christmas Mama. I wonder why I need so many clothes? As Mama tucks stacks of folded laundry in a suitcase, she explains that, even though it’s summer, we need to pack warm clothes, too. “Why?” “Just in case you stay with Christmas Mama.” “Until Christmas?” Mama stays quiet a moment. “Yes.” I move in to help them pack my bag of clothes, my dolls and stuffed animals, and my toy Baby Jesus, resting in a pile of plastic hay. In the car, Cherie and Camille are silent. I chat away, bubbling over about Christmas Mama and hoping there will be new toys, baby dolls, and maybe even an Easy-Bake Kitchen so Mama and Susan can show me how to bake when Papa comes to pick me up from Christmas Mama’s house. Papa slows the car, then pulls into a lonely building in the middle of a three-road intersection. “This is it?” he bursts. “This is where she’ll have them living?” Susan whispers in a way that confuses me even more. “This is only a Christmas visit, Dad, remember?” Papa snaps back. “Enough with the fairy-tale talk, Susan.” His voice is starting to sound like he’s choking, like a frog. “She’ll figure out what’s happening as soon as we leave.” “No leave,” I say. Everyone climbs out of the car, leaving Camille, Cherie, and me in the backseat while they unpack the trunk. I watch closely as Papa walks in the front door of the building and comes back out with his face all red. His neck is bulging. He looks scary. Then he yells. “This is a goddamn glue factory!” he says. I’ve never seen Papa so mad. “The apartment . . . is upstairs . . . from a goddamn glue factory!” “Dad, shhh—” “She couldn’t have found an apartment in a normal complex? She had to pick a damn glue factory in the middle of all this traffic?” He tucks in his shirt like he’s trying to calm down, and he directs Mama and Susan with our luggage up the steps. Then he walks us to the side door.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Once Myers entered the store, he was not able to identify Walter McMillian among several black men present (he had to ask the owner of the store to point McMillian out). He then delivered a note to McMillian, purportedly written by Karen Kelly. According to witnesses, Walter seemed confused both by Myers, a man he had never seen before, and the note itself. Walter threw the note away and went back to what he was doing. He paid little attention to the whole odd encounter. The monitoring ABI agents were left with nothing to suggest any relationship between Myers and McMillian and plenty of evidence indicating that the two men had never met. Still, they persisted with the McMillian theory. Time was passing—seven months, by this time—and the community was fearful and angry. Criticism was mounting. They desperately needed an arrest. Monroe County Sheriff Tom Tate did not have much law enforcement experience. By his own description he was “very local” and took great pride in never having ventured too far from Monroeville. Now, four months into his term as sheriff, he faced a seemingly unsolvable murder and intense public pressure. When Myers told police about McMillian’s relationship with Karen Kelly, it’s likely that the infamous interracial affair was already well known to Tate as a result of the Kelly custody hearings that had generated so much gossip. But there was no evidence against McMillian—no evidence except that he was an African American man involved in an adulterous interracial affair, which meant he was reckless and possibly dangerous, even if he had no prior criminal history and a good reputation. Maybe that was evidence enough.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  A second difficulty is one of place. As long as a thing remains entire, its parts are not scattered about in various places. Now, in this sacrament, it is plain that the bread and wine exist apart in separate places. If then Christ’s flesh be under the appearance of bread, and His blood under the appearance of wine, it would seem to follow that Christ does not remain entire, but that whenever this sacrament is enacted His blood is separated from His body.—Moreover it seems impossible for a greater body to be enclosed in the space of a smaller body. And yet it is evident that Christ’s body is greater in quantity than the bread that is offered on the altar. Therefore seemingly it is not possible for the whole body of Christ to be where there seems to be bread. And if His whole body is not there then, but only part of it, we come back to the first difficulty, namely, that whenever this sacrament is enacted, the parts of Christ’s body are separated.—Further, one body cannot be in several places. Yet it is clear that this sacrament is celebrated in several places. Therefore, seemingly, it is impossible for Christ’s body to be truly present in this sacrament: unless one were to say that one part of Him is here, and another part there. And thus again it follows that the celebration of this sacrament involves the division of Christ’s body into parts: whereas it would seem that the size of Christ’s body is insufficient to be divided into as many parts as there are places in which this sacrament is enacted. A third difficulty arises from what our senses perceive in this sacrament. Even after the consecration, we clearly perceive all the accidents of bread and wine, namely, colour, taste, smell, shape, quantity, and weight: and about these things we cannot be deceived, because the senses are not deceived about their proper sensible objects. Now these accidents cannot be subjected in Christ’s body: nor can they be in the air immediately surrounding it: since several of them are natural accidents, and require a subject of a certain particular nature differing from that of the human body or the air. Nor can they exist by themselves, seeing that the very essence of an accident is to be in something: and accidents, since they are forms, cannot be individualized, save by a subject: so that, apart from a subject, they are universal forms. It follows then that these accidents are in their respective determinate subjects, namely, the substances of bread and wine. Therefore the substance of bread and wine is present, and not the substance of Christ’s body: since two bodies, seemingly, cannot be in the same place.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Here, wily Hamlet gives a far more skeptical account of the “commerce” between beauty and truth than Keats’s Urn. Beauty, he says, can transform truth into a bawd—a whorehouse madam, a procuress of a false and superficial love. Indeed, Hamlet makes the decidedly Fisherian proposition that it is the power of beauty that actually subverts honesty. Hamlet’s paradox is the challenge we all face in reconciling the seductive force of beauty with the great desire to see beauty as having a higher purpose, as being an absolute good, as reflecting universal, objective quality. On the one hand, we have Keats’s poem, whose lines are a perfect representation of our deep desire to see beauty as an “honest” signifier of quality, of some kind of superiority. On the other hand, we have Hamlet, whose life experience has taught him that beauty is not truth; it is merely beauty, signifying nothing but itself, and often in fact at odds with truth. On the one hand, an insistence on “meaning”; on the other, an acceptance that the arbitrary power of beauty can undermine truth. These conflicting views are at the very heart of the contemporary scientific debate I have been engaged in in this book. This same intellectual divide was explored by Isaiah Berlin in the essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he analyzed an ancient Greek aphorism as a metaphor for a contrast in intellectual styles: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” According to Berlin, an intellectual Hedgehog, in search of a “harmonious universe,” sees the world through the lens of a single “central vision.” The Hedgehog’s intellectual mission is to propagate this great vision at every opportunity. An intellectual Fox, by contrast, has no interest in the seductive power of a single idea. The Fox is drawn instead to the subtle complexities of a “vast variety of experiences,” which he does not attempt to fit into a single all-embracing framework. Hedgehogs are on a mission. Foxes play for the joy of it. And like children, whenever they want, Foxes drop their toys and start a new game. The intellectual styles of Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox provide further insights into the co-discoverers of natural selection: Darwin the Fox, and Wallace the Hedgehog. Having each intuited the mechanism of adaptive evolution by natural selection, the two diverged radically in how they elaborated on this key insight. To deal with the diversity of phenomena he observed in nature, Darwin proposed additional biological theories of phylogeny, sexual selection, ecology, pollination biology, even ecosystem services (for example, in his study of the ecological impact of earthworms), and more. Each theory was subtly different, requiring new arguments, types of thinking, and data. Wallace, on the other hand, despite his empirical breadth, strove to establish a “pure Darwinism” in which all of biological evolution was distilled down to the single omnipotent explanation of adaptation by natural selection.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  670. And no certain reason can be given that clearly indicates which of these opinions is true or which is false, because one of these seems no truer to one person than the other does to another person. Therefore they must be equally true or equally false. Hence Democritus said that either nothing is definitely true or, if anything is true, it is not evident to us; for even though we acquire our knowledge of things through the senses, their judgment is not certain since they do not always judge in the same way. Hence we do not seem to have any certainty regarding the truth so that we can say that this opinion is definitely true and its contrary definitely false. 671. But someone could say, in opposing this position, that some rule can be adopted whereby a person can discern among contrary opinions the one that is true. That is, we might say that the judgment which healthy people make about sensible things is right, and the one which sick people make is not; and that the judgment which wise and intelligent people make in matters of truth is right, and the one which foolish or ignorant people make is not. He rejects this reply at the very start on the grounds that no certain judgment about the truth of any theory can be fittingly based on the number, large or small, of persons who hold it, according to which that would be said to be true which seems so to many, and that to be false which seems so to a few; for sometimes what many believe is not simply true. Now health and sickness or wisdom and foolishness do not seem to diff er only by reason of the greater or smaller number of people involved. For if all or most persons were like those who are now thought to be ignorant or foolish, they would be considered wise, and those who are now thought to be wise would be considered foolish. The same applies in the case of health and sickness. Hence the judgment regarding truth and falsity of one who is healthy and wise is no more credible than the judgment of one who is ill and foolish. LESSON 12 Two Reasons Why Some Identify Truth with Appearances ARISTOTLE ’ S TEXT Chapter 5: 1009b 12-1010a 15358. And in general it is because these philosophers think that discretion is sensory perception, and that this in turn is alteration, that they say that what appears to the senses is necessarily true.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “You haven’t got to the indoor version,” I reminded him. “What was that all about?” Gary sighed, locked his hands behind his head, and looked out their large front window. “My folks are a complex subject. I used to think Mom was the cause of their problems. But as I get older, I realize that a marriage consists of two people and both are responsible for what happens in that relationship.” “How did it seem when you were younger?” I wanted to understand what he had felt and thought when he was growing up and before his mature adult experiences had changed his perceptions. “Mom was a really intense person,” he began slowly. “She’d get upset and lose her temper over what seemed like to us was nothing. Things had to be perfect, and perfect her way. I remember Mom racing downstairs with a crowbar telling us she’d put it through the television if we didn’t do what she wanted. She was a stickler about doing homework and getting good grades, which we didn’t appreciate when we were younger but which paid off later. She’d get really wanged out when people were coming over. Every tiny little thing had to be in its place and every detail of the dinner had to be accounted for. It was like royalty was arriving. What an ordeal.” Gary looked at his parents’ photo. “I always felt sorry for Dad because it seemed like Mom just didn’t let up. They’re just so different. My dad loves people. One reason the store has been so successful for so long is that the customers liked to go in just to schmooze with Dad. He was too good a businessman to give away his merchandise, but he was really generous with his time. I remember once seeing him spend fifteen minutes with an old customer who just wanted to buy a light switch cover.” “You strike me as being a lot like your father,” I said, remembering how diligently Gary had tried to find a time for our meeting. “Thanks! I know now that Dad played his part in their marital problems, but when I was living at home I secretly took his side. In fact there were times when I wished that he would leave her. Of course I had no understanding of the reality of what that would be like for us or for them. I should tell you that it never occurred to us that they would stay together just for our sake. That was a kind of adult thinking that we came to later.” “Could you fill me in on what it’s like for children in families like yours, where the parents had problems but they ended up staying together? That’s exactly the information that people need and that we don’t have.” He swallowed hard. “It’s not easy to go back in time,” he said, shaking his head.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Every child from a violent family continued to visit his or her father after the divorce. Men sought to co-opt their children as allies, to help bring the woman back. Often these men found a receptive audience for their pleas. Children tend to sympathize with the parent who wants the marriage restored. They identify with the father’s distress and come to feel that he is the aggrieved one, even when they have witnessed their mother being hurt or were themselves beaten or kicked. When a father begs his children to help bring his wife home, the children can be greatly moved by the transformation of the powerful man to the sad woebegone daddy. In this they are not unlike many abused women who take the man back again and again, out of pity or love, saying, “He didn’t mean to hurt me. He needs me.” Courts typically regard a child’s relationship with the father as being entirely separate from any assaults on the mother. Husbands who beat their wives are not barred from visiting their children. In most states they can still obtain joint custody, although in an increasing number this is no longer possible. The dominant perspective of the courts and mediators is that the child should have access to both parents after the breakup and that parent-child contact should resemble their predivorce relationship as much as possible. Basically it’s assumed that if the father attacked the mother, such violence is irrelevant to the child’s conscience formation or any other aspect of his future development. So following divorce, the woman no longer comes into contact with her ex-husband, except when children are exchanged within visiting arrangements, but the children are in regular contact with the man who beat her. According to the children when they were young and after they’d reached adulthood, no single father discussed or bothered to explain his past violent behavior during the visits. Nor were they instructed to do so by the courts or the mediators. Many didn’t even admit that they had been violent. Some said that maybe they had hit the children’s mother just once. Others denied it completely. Not one father said that he was sorry. No single father admitted that his behavior was wrong. Not one tried to convey any moral principles to his children. This vehement or blanket denial of events that the children had seen with their own eyes was terribly confusing. As some told me later, their pitiful confrontation—“But Daddy, I saw you!”—was met with ice-cold stares. Such children were unable to trust their own observations and withdrew in anguish with an impaired sense of reality and conscience. Since the mothers often did not discuss the violence either, the child’s traumatic experience was never touched. To compound matters, this conspiracy of silence was reinforced by court policy. Judges and mediators are often hostile to allegations of domestic violence, which almost always come from the mother.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  Augustine sums up this condition as the divided will: the mind knows one thing but wants something else; it thinks one thing but feels something else. Augustine sees Paul as describing this condition, the universal punishment for Adam’s sin, in his letter to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. . . . I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. . . . I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. I do not do the good that I want, but the evil that I do not want is what I do” (7.15–20). And Augustine memorably captures this paralyzing paradox of wanting and not wanting the same thing at the same time, describing his own struggle to commit to celibacy as his path into the catholic church, when he prayed da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo, “Grant me chastity and continence; but not yet” (Confessions 8.7,17). Even if the seeker’s ruptured self wants to know God, it is confounded by another difficulty. A person’s ability to know anything at all has been complicated and compromised by humanity’s exile in time. After Eden, Augustine explains, the experience of time marks off crucial differences between the human mind—that is, God’s image in humankind—and God himself. God is outside of time. He knows everything perfectly and (an aspect of this quality of knowing) he knows everything all at once, in “the simultaneity of eternity” (13.7,9). No gap whatsoever distinguishes divine knowing from divine willing and divine doing. Fallen humanity, however, has an utterly different experience of self and time. People know incompletely, they will ineffectively, they do imperfectly. Human consciousness is dislocated, distended by living in time. Augustine cannot say what time is, but he gives a dizzying description of how time is (11.14,17). Time, he says, functions psychologically: its effects tell within the soul: “It is in you, my mind, that I measure time,” 11.27,36). Time is measured by its flow, its ceaseless movement from the future (one type of nonbeing, since it does not yet exist) into the past (another type of nonbeing, since it no longer exists). The future is not yet; the past is no longer. Between these two plains of nonbeing that stretch out infinitely in either direction stands the singular reality of the present. Only the present actually is. Yet the present itself is inherently ungraspable: If we can think of some bit of time that cannot be divided into even the smallest instantaneous moment, that alone is what we call “present.” And this time flies by so quickly from the future into the past that it is an interval of no duration. . . . A present moment takes up no time. (11.15,20).

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Reply to Objection 2: As Augustine says (De Civ. Dei ix): “Christ was known to the demons just as much as He willed; and He willed just as far as there was need. But He was known to them, not as to the holy angels, by that which is eternal life, but by certain temporal effects of His power.” First, when they saw that Christ was hungry after fasting they deemed Him not to be the Son of God. Hence, on Lk. 4:3, “If Thou be the Son of God,” etc., Ambrose says: “What means this way of addressing Him? save that, though He knew that the Son of God was to come, yet he did not think that He had come in the weakness of the flesh?” But afterwards, when he saw Him work miracles, he had a sort of conjectural suspicion that He was the Son of God. Hence on Mk. 1:24, “I know who Thou art, the Holy one of God,” Chrysostom [*Victor of Antioch. Cf. Catena Aurea] says that “he had no certain or firm knowledge of God’s coming.” Yet he knew that He was “the Christ promised in the Law,” wherefore it is said (Lk. 4:41) that “they knew that He was Christ.” But it was rather from suspicion than from certainty that they confessed Him to be the Son of God. Hence Bede says on Lk. 4:41: “The demons confess the Son of God, and, as stated farther on, ‘they knew that He was Christ.’ For when the devil saw Him weakened by His fast, He knew Him to be a real man: but when He failed to overcome Him by temptation, He doubted lest He should be the Son of God. And now from the power of His miracles He either knew, or rather suspected that He was the Son of God. His reason therefore for persuading the Jews to crucify Him was not that he deemed Him not to be Christ or the Son of God, but because he did not foresee that he would be the loser by His death. For the Apostle says of this mystery” (1 Cor. 2:7,8), “which is hidden from the beginning, that ‘none of the princes of this world knew it,’ for if they had known it they would never have crucified the Lord of glory.”

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “Okay, she writes—are you ready?” “Yes!” “ ‘To Regina,’ then the printed message reads, ‘With the old wish that is ever new—Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, too!’ ” “Anything else?” “Yes—my goodness. She signed ‘Love, Aunt Julia.’ ” “Aunt Julia? Addie . . . are you sure?” “Sure I’m sure. I’ll pop it in the mail to you today, you can look at it yourself.” Both when I was sixteen and twenty-eight, I wrote to Paul at Julia and Frank’s house, and neither time did I get a response from them, only from Paul. So why now, after never having contact with me, is she suddenly showing interest? Maybe something happened to Paul that she wants me to know about. Or maybe she just wants me to know the truth. Aunt Julia. How do I suddenly have an aunt Julia? “Regina,” Addie interrupts, “are you there? What are you going to do?” “I don’t know. Will you just send it to me? I’ll call you in a few weeks for Christmas.” Everything about the card is both intriguing and odd, but there are two points that stand out in particular: First, it was sent to Addie’s home—my old foster home—where I haven’t resided for close to a decade. Anyone with a shred of knowledge about my life would know that. Second, how did she not mention her husband, my supposed uncle? I dial Camille, the only other person on earth who could know what this means to me. “What do you think this is about?” I ask her. “I have no idea,” she says thoughtfully. “Do you think Paul died ? Or maybe this woman is sick and she wants to tell you something before she gets worse. Whatever it means . . . tread carefully, sweetie. I know you’re excited, but this could take you to a place that you’ve already moved past. You could end up really hurting.” It’s too late: I’m totally sucked in. “It’s not like I went and opened the door, Camille. She did. There’s something going on that I need to know. How about this: I’ll write her back, rather than call her.” “Don’t mention Paul until she does—let her bring him up. And don’t question why she signed the card ‘Aunt.’ ” “But why?” “Because you may scare her away. Just let her know how well you’re doing and give her your new address and phone number.” “Oh, come on, Camille. Why don’t I just call her, instead?” “Because, Gi, when you’re not getting truthful answers, you can be a little . . . abrasive.” “Ha!” She knows me too well. “I like to think of it as assertive . . . but you’re right.” “Just write her first.

• From Sin: The Early History of an Idea (2012)

  All of a person’s consciousness, her ability to know and to understand, is circumscribed by and limited to this infinitely tiny, perpetually transient moment. Experience—by definition, solely in the present—ceaselessly runs between the fingers of the soul like sand. From this constant flow of atomized instances, how can a person possibly know anything, grasp anything? To answer this question, Augustine thinks about language. Language, like thought, like experience, like consciousness, is also intrinsically distended in time. It too depends upon flow, a linear passage from being (present) to nonbeing (past). Consonants and vowels alternate to form phonemes, words follow words, nouns follow verbs. Both in its smallest units (consonants and vowels) and in its larger ones (words, sentences, and more), language works by having a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Augustine the ancient rhetorician thinks in terms of language spoken and heard, 11.6,8–11.11,3.) Only through the integrative functioning of memory can meaning be wrung from language. Once the end of a sound, a word, a sentence is reached, memory recalls the whole, and then interprets what the sounds convey. Interpretation and understanding, the attainment of meaning, are thus the accomplishments of memory, whether for language or more broadly for experience itself. Meaning, in consequence, is never immediately present. It is always and necessarily mediated, retrospective, imperfect. This tenuousness of meaning—thus, of knowing—is symptomatic, claims Augustine, of humankind’s penal situation in time. Truth without shadows, meaning without mediation, love without conflict, will come only at history’s end, when time itself is swallowed up in “the Sabbath of eternal life” (13.36,51). In City of God, painting across a huge canvas—twenty-two books, written in a period of over fifteen years, covering all of human history—Augustine further developed these ideas. Seen from one perspective, City of God is a universal history of the conflict between two sorts of love, amor dei (love of God) and amor sui (love of self), from the fall of Satan to the final redemption. Seen from another, City of God is a review of sin and of its terrible consequences for humanity, past (beginning in Eden), present (in the power relations of people, communities, societies, and empires), and future (when saints are saved and sinners finally and forever damned).

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  For children who have not reached adolescence—which means most children of divorce since demographers tell us that 80 percent of divorces occur by the ninth year of marriage—splitting the family to solve family problems makes no sense at all. For them, it’s a bizarre and terrifying idea. Few children are aware that their parents are suffering. Even if they have seen one or both of their parents crying or yelling or hitting, they do not make the connection between the parents’ behavior and the breakup of the marriage. Among younger children, such a connection is an abstract idea far beyond their ability to understand. It’s well known that young children cannot cope with what they don’t understand. Moreover—and this is particularly difficult for adults to grasp—children do not understand about recurrent patterns of behavior. The fact that Daddy hit Mommy several times and then said that he was sorry in no way signifies for them that this behavior is likely to reoccur. So the divorce makes no sense to them as a necessary protection for their mother. Thus children do not think of divorce as a remedy. Similarly, when they are ill they do not distinguish the pain caused by the illness from the pain of the treatment. Divorce for the child is the root cause of the trouble that follows, not the solution to the troubled marriage. They do not want to adjust their lives to the divorce. They want to make the divorce go away and restore the marriage. And they continue to hope and even expect for many years that this will indeed happen. It is hard for children to distinguish their powerful wishes from reality. I have had many discussions with children about their reconciliation hopes in which I have patiently pointed out that both of their parents are remarried. Their equally patient response has been, “If they divorced once they could again.” Parents would be surprised to learn that many children cling to their reconciliation hopes well into their teens. The wide gulf between the adult mind and the child’s mind is the same in high-and low-conflict divorces. Children in the most abusive families are often very worried about their parents. But unlike adults, they do not conclude that they or their parents would be better off if the parents separated. To the utter despair of mothers who, like Larry’s mother, have to mobilize all their courage to leave the marriage, children in violent marriages want their parents to stay together. They want the fighting to stop but they want the marriage to continue. In his campaign to bring his father back and reunite the family, Larry engaged in behavior absolutely typical of children his age and even much older. Being children they fully believe that they can rescue the family. Often they think that it is their moral duty to do so.

• From Untrue (2018)

  After all, self-censure is no small thing. In Lust in Translation, Druckerman writes about an American woman so upset by a mutual attraction she and her doctor experience but never act on that she feels she doesn’t even know who she is anymore. Another woman who is engaged to be married posts online that she is nearly suicidal about having kissed a man not her fiancé at a bar. Once. We all have friends who say they simply could never have an affair, period. And friends who say they are tempted but “would never dare.” What separates these women, the Sarahs who long for sexual adventure and autonomy yet hesitate to pull the trigger, from the Annikas who do not? The Florida women—who married early and then sought out sexual adventures with men other than their husbands—challenge our presumption that, when it comes to women and affairs, we have become more and more open and accepting, that sexual progress is an arrow shooting forward, unconstrained, into empty space. These women also offer a compelling model of female sexual entitlement. They desired sex and pursued it, their marital status and vows of fidelity notwithstanding. Depending on your point of view, you might say that since their day, we’ve had setbacks. Annika’s story brings home the way many circumstances of women’s lives that seem unrelated to their sexuality—childcare options, labor-force participation, family and peer networks—can actually determine the most intimate choices they make. A few weeks after my talk with Sarah, I found myself sitting in Annika’s cheerful, cozy kitchen, making small talk about our children and our work. Annika was warm, open, and engaging, with chicly messy blonde hair and an infectious sense of humor. She was Scandinavian and had moved to a wealthy suburb of Chicago with her family as a teen. The transition was jarring. “I was used to a high level of independence and maturity. At home, my friends and I could go out to lunch on our school lunch hour and have a beer,” she said. “But in the US, I had to bring a note from my mother if I was late for school because I was stuck in traffic. It was so infantilizing and confusing!” Sexual standards were just as bewildering. Back at home, Sex Ed “was practically demonstrated.” She laughed. A lot of information was imparted, in great detail, beginning before adolescence. What Annika didn’t learn at school, she heard from her mother, who spoke to her honestly about sex. “I remember her once saying, ‘When grown-ups with kids go away to a hotel without them, it’s a free-for-all!’…She gave me the sense that it was fun.” Indeed, sex was “sort of in the air” wherever you looked while Annika was growing up. “Where I’m from, you see [women’s breasts] in ads, on billboards. There’s not the same shameful feeling there is here. Where I’m from, prostitution is legal, for God’s sake, and that was always my baseline.”